Trading truth for access?

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When Saddam Hussein's psychopathic son Uday told CNN's top news
executive, Eason Jordan, that he planned to assassinate his two
brothers-in-law who had defected from Iraq, he wasn't concerned that
Jordan would rush the explosive scoop onto the air. Uday figured the
influential journalist would sit on the story and say nothing -- and he
was right. The news didn't leak and the brothers-in-law were murdered
soon after.

We know about that conversation, and about CNN's silence, because
Jordan admitted it last week. In a New York Times column titled "The
news we kept to ourselves," he confessed that CNN habitually suppressed
stories of torture, mutilation, and other atrocities -- "things that
could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives
of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff. . . . I felt awful
having these stories bottled up inside me."

Jordan's disclosure triggered a storm of criticism, and no wonder.
It is scandalous that a network calling itself "the most trusted name in
news" would sanitize the truth about a dictatorship it claimed to be
covering objectively. And the scandal is compounded by Jordan's lack of
contrition. He makes no apology for downplaying the horrors of Saddam's
regime. If CNN hadn't done so, he says, innocent people would have
died.

But as Franklin Foer reported in The New Republic last October, CNN
didn't bury stories only out of fear. It bent over backward to remain
on good terms with Saddam's Ministry of Information, which controlled
the all-important visas needed to stay in Iraq. "Nobody has schmoozed
the ministry harder," Foer wrote, "than the head of CNN's News Group,
Eason Jordan, who has traveled to Baghdad 12 times since the Gulf War."

What emerged from those meetings, it seems, was a policy of going
along to get along. CNN's stories frequently echoed the Baath Party
spin, deferentially covering its agitprop or toadying to Saddam. ("It's
. . . a vote of defiance against the United States . . . . This really
is a huge show of support!" -- CNN's Jane Arraf on Saddam's 100 percent
"election" victory last fall.) Rarely was there an unvarnished look at
the regime's cruelty and deceit. That, Jordan now admits, was "the news
we kept to ourselves."

But CNN wasn't the only offender, and it doesn't just happen in
Iraq.

News organizations boast that they cover even the toughest beats
without fear or favor. Sometimes it's true. But sometimes journalists
choose to censor themselves instead -- to toe a vicious regime's line,
to soft-pedal its ruthlessness. They may do it to save their skin, or
to ingratiate themselves with the dictator, or to protect the bragging
rights that come with access to a big story. Whatever the excuse, the
results are the same: The public is cheated, the news is corrupted, and
a despot is strengthened.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to Thomas Friedman, who described
in his 1989 best seller "From Beirut to Jerusalem" what it was like to
be a reporter in Beirut during the years when southern Lebanon was
dominated by Yasser Arafat's PLO and Syria's Palestinian loyalists.

"No discussion about the reality of Beirut reporting would be
complete," he wrote, "without mentioning a major reporting constraint
journalists there faced: physical intimidation." He explained, for
example, how Syria's agents dealt with one journalist they didn't like:
He was found with a bullet in his head and his writing hand mutilated
with acid. Earlier, Friedman recalled his own terror on learning that
Arafat's spokesman wanted to see him "immediately" about the stories
he'd been filing to New York:

"I lay awake in my bed the whole night worrying that someone was
going to burst in and blow my brains all over the wall."

No "major breaking" news story was ever suppressed because
journalists were too intimidated to report it, Friedman insisted. But
behind that fig leaf, he conceded a shameful truth:

"There were . . . stories which were deliberately ignored out of
fear. Here I will be the first to say `mea culpa.' How many serious
stories were writen from Beirut about the well-known corruption in the
PLO leadership. . .? It would be hard to find any hint of them in
Beirut reporting before the Israeli invasion."

And then, an even more damning admission:

"The truth is," Friedman wrote, "the Western press coddled the PLO.
. . For any Beirut-based correspondent, the name of the game was keeping
on good terms with the PLO, because without it would you not get the
interview with Arafat you wanted when your foreign editor came to town."

There are moral costs to doing business with thugs and
totalitarians. Reporters who forget that accuracy, not access, is the
bedrock of their profession can too easily find themselves paying those
costs -- trading off truth for a coveted interview or visa, turning a
blind eye to dissent, treating barbaric criminals with deference. Or
saying nothing when the dictator's son says he is planning a double
assassination.

When "the name of the game" becomes "keeping on good terms" with the
world's most evil men, journalism turns into something awfully hard to
distinguish from collaboration. It didn't start with Eason Jordan, and
it didn't end in Baghdad.

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